My father was a consultant obstetrician, his brother was an accountant, but I was rubbish at science and didn’t like maths. I was pushed down this corridor – ‘why don’t you do law?’ I knew absolutely nothing about it and no-one in our family had been a lawyer.
Some of my best friends still are people I met at university. A lot of them have gone off to do other things but one of them who has remained a close friend from the very first evening we met is a senior corporate partner at Allen & Overy, Richard Hough. Really lovely guy.
I had boyhood dreams of playing rugby or cricket for a career but then realised I wasn’t good enough. I would have always done something with people. I have a love for history, which I studied. I could have been a history teacher. I would have loved to have been a sports correspondent for one of the newspapers and travel the world. Watching live football, rugby and cricket, the Olympics. That would be a dream.
I sometimes wonder if I could have followed a career in the foreign office. When I was living in Paris, I had two good friends who were working at the British Embassy. We used to play squash together all the time. My poor wife was a squash widow. They both went on to become ambassadors. One is the current British ambassador to Spain and another was the ambassador to Yemen and also to the UAE. Absolutely fascinating.
Travers Smith has always been a nice firm. It was what attracted to me to it when I was a summer student in 1988 and I joined in September 1990. I’ve just had my 30th anniversary, which is a lifetime ago, isn’t it? I always say to the new trainees, none of you were born when I started here! People genuinely respect and support each other and are not aggressive in the way they go about business. We want clients and other people we deal with to go away thinking that was a good experience. We have a good bedside manner.
I always seem to get the costumes that involve wearing something over my head, which makes it impossibly hot within seconds.
As managing partner, I’ve had to go through the humiliation of getting dressed up at our Christmas party every year. The costume, chosen by our entertainments committee, fits with the theme of the evening. I’ve been a deep-sea diver; one half of the Elephant and Castle. Chris Hale was the other half. He always seemed to get first choice of the outfits. I always seem to get the costumes that involve wearing something over my head, which makes it impossibly hot within seconds. When I was a clown, Chris was in a very smart circus ringmaster’s costume with a big top hat.
You always remember one of the first deals you did on your own. I remember leading when I was only a year qualified on a private equity investment in a company called Sporting Index, which is huge now, but it was a tiny little company back in those days. I learned all about spread-betting.
I bought Hamleys for a French client back in 2012. That was great fun. You had Hamleys, a very British store, being bought by a purchaser with a very French management. Hamleys was owned by the liquidators of an Icelandic bank. The cultural hotchpotch was fascinating. We all got together for the closing and had got to the point of signing all the documents and opening the champagne. In walks Hamley Bear, in full costume. Normally he’d be in the store welcoming kids, but they got him to come over in a taxi.
I would like to think that my management style is inclusive. Travers Smith is a genuine partnership where all of the partners want to feel involved in decision making. I’ve always wanted to share what we were doing and why we were doing it with the partners before we did it and ensure, where possible, that information is cascaded down throughout the entire firm. That’s something I’ve learnt over the years – the need to really bring people with you.
I was Chris Hale’s trainee and then his associate. He was very much responsible for pulling me into the private equity team that he created over a quarter of a century ago and pushing me forward to open up our Paris office. We had an incredibly close working relationship as senior partner and managing partner. He has been a very important person in my career. Going to Paris as a new partner in 1999, opening up the office in a foreign city, speaking a foreign language, with no clients. Making a success of that. I’ll always be proud of what we achieved.
Chris Carroll was a mentor to me in the noughties. He took me under his wing as we developed our international strategy. We travelled a lot, met a lot of foreign lawyers together and had a lot of fun. I have been fortunate to meet a lot of inspirational lawyers at foreign firms. Zia Mody at AZB & Partners in India stands out. Maria-Pia Hope at Vinge in Sweden. I’ve spent a lot of time talking to foreign lawyers, learning about what they do at their firms, how they run them.
I think of my team as my guiding coalition. I hope they regard me as a people person, pragmatic, thoughtful and, less flatteringly, they might describe me as pernickety and occasionally a pain in the arse! I’m very much a details man.
One of the reasons this lockdown is hard at the moment is that we’re doing it all on our own. We’re not getting any of the energy back we get from social encounters, being in the office and seeing people. For me, in normal times, that’s really important. In a leadership role you always want to appear positive. All of that takes energy. This crisis has gone on for so long now that I regret having to perpetually share a screen with friends and colleagues and not dinner and a glass of wine. I can’t wait to do that again. They talk about the roaring twenties. Can you imagine a pulled pint of beer with some Padron peppers?
It’s a team effort and I think we’ve done a good job in this very difficult environment, looking after people, making them feel supported. It’s been tough for so many people. This is a terrible health crisis first and foremost but also an economic crisis. Those things bring terrible worries for people. Helping people through. That is what I hope to feel proud of when we emerge from this. I said to the partnership at the beginning of this crisis, if there’s one thing people will remember it’s how we treated them. So we lived by that.
I said to the partnership at the beginning of this crisis, if there’s one thing people will remember it’s how we treated them. So we lived by that.
My wife doesn’t have very good box-set etiquette. We will start watching something and the next evening when I want to watch episode two, I will find she’s already on series three. I’m not very good at sitting down and watching TV for hours on end. Put me in front of a Six Nations rugby match or an England cricket test match and you’ll find me hard to budge.
I’m an avid reader but I don’t read as much as I would like. I mix it up between fiction and a lot of historical stuff. I love books on India by the likes of William Dalrymple. I love anything by William Boyd. I really like this cartoonist called Monsieur Z. I’m interested in slightly quirky art.
I’m a fair-weather cyclist. What time I have outside work is spent with my family, with friends. I’m lucky to have old friends who live locally and lots of new friends we’ve met since moving back from Paris. My wife is quite sociable, so I’m known as ‘Elaine’s husband!’ I’m pretty good at leaving work at work, but it’s a bit harder at the moment, of course. We like to go out for dinner or a drink, go for a walk, watch the children play sport. I love all of that social time.
I was musical as a child. I used to play the viola. I was pretty mediocre at the violin and when I was about 11 the violin teacher said to my mother: ‘He’s not that good at the violin but the orchestras always need violists.’ Music is my eldest son’s big passion. I love listening to him play. He plays the piano, the bass, the electric guitar, the acoustic guitar and he’s a very good drummer. I love listening to music and I will spend weekends listening to my old records and ones I’ve bought since. Vinyl’s back in vogue. REM would be my go-to band. I’ve been listening quite a lot recently to a fabulous album of theirs called The Best of REM at the BBC. It’s recorded John Peel sessions, Glastonbury, various other things.
I had this beautiful summer lined up. With my sons doing their A-levels and GCSEs, me stepping down from this job, I was going to have a little break. I had tickets lined up for the first two Lions test matches in South Africa and was going to spend time travelling. If I get to a beach in Cornwall I will feel quite lucky. It’s got to the point where going to Sainsbury’s is an expedition, the highlight of the week!
David Patient has been the managing partner of Travers Smith since January 2015 and will be succeeded by private equity partner Edmund Reed on 1 July 2021.